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“... belonged to his parents too. In the absence of any other aristocracy in residence in Dublin, Sir William and Lady Wilde represented a type of grandeur that they had built with their books and their brains, their independence of mind and their high-toned eccentricity. When Wilde describes himself in De Profundis as ‘a lord of language’, he is suggesting ...”

“... a rich widow and built Oxnead Hall, ten miles north of Norwich. Clement’s great-great-nephew, William, inherited it in 1632. ‘The Paston Treasure’ (c.1663) Six years later William set out on a Grand Tour that would take in the German states, Italy, Athens, Constantinople and Cairo. He built up a magnificent ...”

“... monument-building urge, they simply wouldn’t exist. Whatever else it may be, Sarah Lawrence is William Van Duzer Lawrence’s tribute to his wife, Sarah; Vassar is Matthew Vassar’s tribute to himself. Smith and Williams, in Massachusetts, sprang up to commemorate their donors. But for sheer iron-willed capriciousness and morbid narcissism, nothing comes ...”

“... Sylvester explains that he became interested in art when, at 17, he was fascinated by a black and white reproduction of a Matisse. He at once began to paint in oils, but soon discovered that he lacked talent and began to write about art instead, devoting himself thenceforth to the black and white of the page. A left-wing ...”

“... The William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow was reopened on 2 August by Chris Robbins, leader of Waltham Forest Council, who pronounced its refurbishment ‘truly stunning’. He said how ‘extremely proud’ he and his fellow councillors were to have been part of the ‘multimillion-pound development’, which has seen the fine Georgian house that was Morris’s childhood home from 1848 to 1856 ‘restored to its former glory’ and its collections enhanced by a new space for temporary exhibitions, a tea room and a freshly landscaped park ...”

“... a moment or two to realise that they were moving at all – was as far from the blurred black and white videos produced in the 1960s and 1970s as Fox Talbot’s earliest photographs are from the detailed prints made by the likes of Beato a few decades later.The work exhibited in Video Acts: Single Channel Works from the Collections of Pamela and Richard ...”

“... They wanted textiles: silk from China and ‘fine muslin, printed chintz and palampores, plain white baftas, diapers and dungarees, striped allejaes, mixed cotton and silk ginghams and embroidered quilts’ from India (‘a definitive glossary of types has yet to be made’). From China they wanted porcelain and tea. Almost any product of the Asian world ...”

“... ingenuity to convey it. But the restless contemporaneity of her vision makes a stark contrast with William Cooper’s impeccable Scenes from Metropolitan Life, written in the 1950s but held back from publication up to the present day for legal reasons. Cooper’s work, falling between the celebrated Scenes from Provincial Life and Scenes from Married ...”

“... the West was full of enablers and apologists. Hitler’s American admirers included Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst and Charles Lindbergh. General Motors, DuPont and IBM did business with the Nazis. So did MGM. It’s no shock to see democratic politicians cosying up to Saudi autocrats, or Rupert Murdoch or the Walt Disney Company ingratiating ...”

“... about Randall Jarrell’s possible suicide, Bill’s own depression. And I talked to him about William James’s own breakdown and his resuscitation through faith. What in hell am I doing with all these theatre types? Alfred Kazin’s journals, 26 December 1986 Discount Kazin’s weary, load-bearing sigh in this characteristic entry from his ...”

“... asked respondents to identify their ethnic group, that I reluctantly began to think of myself as white. In an era in which many people lament the tyranny of identity politics, it may seem healthy that the state should discourage racial or ethnic identification.Yet since returning to France twenty years later, I have become disillusioned with French ...”

“... What​ was it like growing up in black and white?’ was a question I asked my mother once. Until that moment her memories of childhood, so much more engrossing than any bedtime story, had unspooled in my head in perfect greyscale. (They do still, in childish defiance of the facts.) It wasn’t as if I’d seen many photographs of her as a girl – I still haven’t – but simply that the past, as I had perceived it, was defined by an absence of colour ...”

“... belong in the region they haunt. One ghost has a chapter to herself. In 1755, a gentleman named William Salisbury killed his servant, Anna Dorothea Swarts, by dragging her behind his horse. The jury verdict was the evasive ‘ignoramus’, a term that either ignored the charge entirely or claimed ignorance of its legal merit. Salisbury escaped justice, but ...”

“... continually forsook legal niceties to please the political gallery. Aware that most of the ANC’s white supporters were Jews, as were a number of their legal defence team, including Joffe, he was determined to show the regime that he was a ‘good Jew’, resolved as they were to crack down on the blacks and the bad Jews. As soon as he met Joffe he began ...”

“... be vindicated in their appeals, even though they had one trump card up their sleeves: they were white. The petitioners’ circumstances were unusual: they had been transported to Barbados as suspected Royalist insurgents after the failed Salisbury Uprising of 1655. But, in the mid-17th century, white people could be found ...”